[Air-l] a modest proposal - proceedings

[Bunz, Ulla]

Rasputin (and others who have the same questions),
The papers on the AoIR website are accessible to members only. You are able to access some parts of the website without having a confirmed member logon, but one of the exec needs to manually set your status to member for you to see the papers that are up. I know this because I a) uploaded several hundred papers myself when the organization moved websites, and b) approved the member access for several hundred members around the same time. I recommend checking with Alex or Monica (offline) regarding your member status and your website access). Please also note that even the archive online is not complete. It is optional for people to submit their paper to have it uploaded, and maybe the leadership hasn't been pushing people as hard to submit papers in the last year or two as it did before, I don't know that, but it could explain why there are fewer "recent" papers available. And, as was pointed out, the paper edition is not a proceedings, but instead a collection of papers that were submitted separately to be considered for publication in that format. 
In short, AoIR doesn't have proceedings. Whether we should or not has been debated before and I recommend you or anyone else interested in continuing that debate first peruse the archives to see what arguments have already been exchanged. Times change and maybe AoIR will change as well, but I can tell you that one of the main arguments *against* proceedings (brought up by members, not the leadership) was the fact that it would be considered a publication when many people would prefer submitting their papers to a (presumably) print journal. Not all feel that way, of course, so debating the issue of whether we should have proceedings or not should occur before the discussion of which format (electronic, paper, both, etc.) they should take.
Ulla
 
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Ulla Bunz
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication
University Center C, Suite 3100
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL 32306
Email: ubunz at fsu.edu
Phone: 850-644-1809
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